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"Ludonarrative dissonance, a term first coined by the game designer Clint Hocking, arises whenever a video game's fiction says one thing and its gameplay says an opposite thing," video game critic Tom Bissell wrote in his review of Max Payne 3. "Some designers and critics regard ludonarrative dissonance as a core problem in modern game design."

Oddly, game design has done little to distance itself from this problem.

Take, for example, Hitman: Absolution. This is a stealth game about a bald guy with a barcode tattooed to the back of his head. You can put on a costume to disguise yourself, but the disguise is blown if people wearing the same clothes get too close to you. Sometimes shooting a car causes it to blow up; often it does not. I don't mean to pick on Hitman either; many games are much worse at this sort of inconsistency.

The above video game "review" of Hitman: Absolution by Conan O'Brien is probably the best review of that game that I've encountered, largely because it hilariously and unwittingly exposes some of the most irritating and consistent flaws in video game design.

Basically each of his jokes says something profoundly important about games whether or not he realizes it, and this is (I suspect) mainly because here we have someone who doesn't play video games at all playing one and simply speaking his mind. The conceit of many video games these days is that you can get away with bad writing and preposterous narrative choices simply because it's a game.

After all, if a game like Call of Duty is the top seller year over year, why do anything to change? That franchise is brimming with ludonarrative dissonance, but it sells like hotcakes.

In modern games you can have a stealth title where the AI simply stops looking for you after a while even though you've been running around killing them off one at a time, a fact they're well aware of but apparently too forgetful to care about.

You can have a game in which you slaughter hordes upon hordes of enemies only to suddenly cut to a pre-rendered scene where one simple bullet takes your avatar down for the count. You are helpless against these cut-scenes in a way that you are never helpless against your digital opponents.

I think that as players of games, as consumers who spend vast amounts of time playing them, we can sometimes forget how ludicrous they can be to an outsider. We can overlook the small details that, to a non-gamer, might be much more garish and obtuse. Not that "outsiders" should necessarily determine the future of game design; rather, games should strive to be more sensible in terms of not just story, but in terms of clear cut rules that make sense within the game world itself. And we should be less complacent.

Thanks to everyone who pointed me toward Conan O'Brien as a model for game review scores. Spot on.

P.S. The flipside to this is that a game like Hitman is, regardless of its foibles, pretty fun at times. Games can get away with this stuff not only because we're complacent, but because they can still be fun regardless. Though I would argue that they are more fun when they follow a strict set of internal rules that make sense both in terms of narrative and gameplay.